[elfman2]

Ipstenu

It looks as if there is a very round-about way of implementing a crude version of this forum/blog integration in buddypress. Buddypress seems to come in modules of social networking components. One called “Activity Streams” can be configured to show activity (such as blog posts) of a member and his “friends” and display a list of it like a forum. Perhaps this could be tweaked to show only blog posts of all members, creating at least a common “read only” forum. Readers would just have to click through the list and comment directly on the blogs using another component called “The Wire” which seems to be a site wide component commenting system… kind of cool. But even if it works as suggested, all this by itself would still be very limiting.

Thinking on this further, to do this correctly, it requires database integration between the blogs and forums with no duplication of data. Here is what is needed:

– Posters to a forum should have the option to have their topics or comments viewed as an entry to at least one of the blogs that they have permission to edit.

– Bloggers should have the option to have their posts viewed as a subject in at least one of the forums that they have permission to edit.

– Comments to either should be visible in both forum and blog views.

– Edits to one should be reflected in the other views.

– Adding a blog-forum link (or perhaps even a blog-blog or forum-forum link) should be supported at any time by any person with the permission to post to a view that they are linking an existing post into (assuming the author of the original post authorizes that.)

– Deletions should be managed with an option to unlink the post from any of the views in which the author or moderator has permission to delete it from, and only delete the post entirely if it is unlinked from all forums and all blogs.

This is not rocket science, and it’s just the beginning. There is way more than just forums and blogs that this concept supports, and I think that the results would be just as explosive.

One thing promising about BuddyPress’s “Activity Stream” is documented as ”Custom components can also hook into the activity streams, meaning any sort of data can be tracked and recorded.“ Would that mean that a third party forum like bbpress, could be configured to use those streams to access blog posts and comments for exactly the kind of forum/blog integration outlined above?